Inside Llewyn Davis

Perfectly timed for a January day, here’s the gray and wintry trailer for Inside Llewyn Davis, the Coen brothers’ apparently sort-of-bleak look at the Greenwich Village folk music scene and all the would-be wandering troubadours who blew through there, sometimes carrying cats. Oscar Isaac plays the title character—loosely based on Dave Von Ronk, an important inspiration to the likes of Bob Dylan (whose “Farewell” provides the somber soundtrack here) but who nevertheless has been as shoved aside by history as Isaac so often is here. Carey Mulligan plays his former lover, her distaste for Isaac as severe as her condom methods, while John Goodman and John Goodman’s tiny bangs turn up to pass dry judgment on the whole folk music scene before passing out cold on a bathroom floor. To quote Dylan, “Something is happening here / But you don’t know what it is / Crap, I hope that cat doesn’t get hurt / Hey, isn’t Justin Timberlake in this movie?”